PSR 4(196)2016

WOJCIECH RAFAŁOWSKI

The Quality of Government and National Identification

This article studies the relationship between various dimensions of the legitimization of a political system and national identification. The analysis presented here assumes that the emotional attitudes that link people to their place of residence are conditional. The way the state performs its functions should determine how, and to what extent, such attitudes prevail. The hypothesis suggests that a positive evaluation of government policy enhances identification with the state.

An empirical study using data from fourteen post-communist countries provides the basis for accepting a considerable part of the hypothesis. People’s evaluation of social policy, of democracy as a system, and their confidence in public institutions, are of central importance for identification. A separate analysis for Poland shows how perceptions of citizens’ equality before the law have a significant impact on national identification.

Keywords: national identification, legitimization, public policy, quality of government, evaluation of government, public goods.

This article establishes how ordinary people understand classical categories of political thought. By interpreting qualitative data, we show how contemporary Polish society conceives such fundamental concepts of political philosophy as ‘the individual,’ ‘society,’ and ‘the state.’ Finally, we point out the implications of our findings for political science and political sociology, especially in regard to popular political culture.

Pathogenesis of the Polish Public Sphere. The Intelligentsia and Popular Unrest during and after the 1905 Revolution

In this paper we analyze the nascent years of the Polish public sphere during the years before and after the 1905 Revolution. We assert that it was a moment of clash between, on the one hand, the intelligentsia and its de facto bourgeois vision of politics, and on the other a rising proletarian counter-public. The popular unrest initiated a massive upsurge of workers into the process of mass politics. As we argue, this situation shocked the elites, attached to their utopian vision of the Polish people, “enlightened” from above by the intelligentsia.

Consequently, their reaction was ambivalent, if not reluctant. The intelligentsia’s attitude was growingly tainted with a conservative fear of the masses, which inhibited the development of plebeian constituencies and forms of political articulation. This posed a cornerstone for the future layering of the public sphere, leading to what we call its pathogenesis. It produced outcomes lasting for years, as well as a general contempt towards democratic demands resulting in the impossibility of collective bargaining about popular economic interests.

In this article I analyze discursive practices that serve to reproduce models of femininity and that are adopted by lay women employed in central Church organizations, including in diocesan chanceries and ecclesiastical courts. The key discursive practice is dissociation, which excludes women from various institutional orders of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, keeping them in their place in the hierarchy, and sanctioning non-normative gender models.

Drawing on integration theories of gender and new institutionalism in sociology, I depart in this article from individualist and identity views of gender. I consider this category as a social institution, that is, as the social rules, both formal and informal, that restrict and liberate human action and are reproduced and transformed in social practices as a result of human agency.

My article is based on 31 in-depth interviews which I conducted with lay women working in administrative and evangelizing organizations of the Church in Poland.

Based on ethnographic research in 28 young middle-class households in Warsaw, this paper examines the money practices of couples living together, including how they set rules for budgeting, spending, and saving money. Drawing from practice theory and working with evidence gathered among young Poles, the paper shows how the couples jointly create a financial arrangement and then ground it in daily practices, transform it, and adjust it to changing circumstances. As the partners share a practical understanding and the rules are intelligible to each of them, this arrangement reflects the current order in the given household. By reconstructing the explicit or tacit beliefs as to why certain money practices are appropriate, desirable, acceptable, or completely inadmissible, this paper argues that everyday money practices are moral in nature and that a financial arrangement requires moral justification.

JOANNA ZALEWSKA

MARTA COBEL-TOKARSKA

Rationalization of Pleasure and Emotions: The Analysis of the Blogs of Polish Minimalists

In this paper, we focus on consumption practices reflected on blogs of Polish minimalists. We analyzed 16 top blogs of the minimalists present in the Polish blogosphere. The objective of the minimalists is to consume less and live simple life without the excess of material objects. We studied the instructions of everyday conduct which the minimalists give on their blogs, as well as the meanings they assign to their practices: their personal stories of becoming a minimalist and statements of their values. The authors belong to one generation—their childhood took place in the times of the shortage economy in the 1980s. This influenced the whole trajectory of their lives and their consumer choices.

To interpret their practices we use the categories of rationalization of Max Weber and modern hedonism of Colin Campbell. It appears that minimalists strive for reaching certain emotional states, e.g. peace and wellbeing they imagine, in line with the theory of modern hedonism. A path to those emotional states consists of rationalization of all the temporary, impulse-based pleasures and control over emotions involved in consumption.

JÓZEF BANIAK

In Vitro Method in the Understanding of Polish Secondary School and University Students: Between Prohibition and Choice

This article presents an analysis of the views and opinions of secondary school students in Kalisz anduniversity students in Poznań in regard to in vitro fertilization and its use by infertile couples. The basis for the analysis is sociological research conducted in the years 2007 and 2011 among 456 secondary school students and 426 university students.

SIMON ZAGORSKI-THOMAS

The Influence of Recording Technology and Practice on Popular Music Performance in the Recording Studio in Poland between 1960 and 1989

When recorded Polish popular music between 1960 and 1989 is compared to music from the USA and Western Europe, there is a striking difference in the sound of the productions. A positivist narration of these differences might characterize them as being more ‘advanced’: of using newer technologies and the techniques that grew out of them. This article aims to look deeper into these musical and sonic differences and to explore how economic and technological factors affected these differences through a variety of social mechanisms. While a particular set of working practices and value judgments about those practices can be seen to have been maintained by these factors, the article will also look at how that caused a different set of musical and sonic developments.

By employing Actor Network Theory underpinned by the ecological approach to perception and embodied cognition, the way that occupational and social roles evolved in Poland’s music industry during this period will be examined. Although the lack of availability of new recording and instrument technologies was important, it will also be seen that by channeling musical creativity in different directions when the new technological options weren’t open, Polish popular music developed differently rather than simply belatedly.

Polish Sociological Review – digitalization of publications and monographs in order to ensure and maintain an open access through the Internet is financed by the decision no. 618/P-Dun/2016 allocated by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education for the dissemination of knowledge.

Polish Sociological Review – The English-language versions of publications were financed on the basis of decision no. 618/P-DUN/2016 by funds allocated by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education for the dissemination of knowledge.